No one ever believed her. For years, Amy told her story, but she was merely laughed at and ridiculed by everyone in town. “The poor little actress flipped her lid,” people said. Her friends abandoned her, her family just felt sorry for her and paid for a shrink to come once a week to talk to Amy while she lay on the couch, or paced the floor with anger. Even this didn’t help anything. Amy knew she wasn’t crazy. She just couldn’t prove it. She had nothing from that night to show what happened. She didn’t have the long green gown anymore. She didn’t have that beautiful coat with the fur collar. She didn’t have the creamy, gray and blue pearl necklace that she had found on the floor in the tower of the mansion. She had nothing.
When the fateful night occurred, Amy had driven back into town as fast as she could to get help for Chloe, knowing that everyone in town would be wondering where the two girls had disappeared to for so long. She jumped out of the SUV and went to the police station first. She told them everything about how she and Chloe had gone to Murky Shallows in order to talk to the owner about using the decaying mansion for a murder mystery dinner theatre that their acting troupe was going to put on, and how Chloe had mysteriously disappeared while Amy was locked up and drugged in a remote bedroom. The police only looked at her strangely. They informed her that there had been no missing person reports in the last two days and that no one had been looking for either girl. At the time, Amy was confused. Against the back wall, she saw a digital clock that had the date and time emblazoned on the face of the clock. It simply read, October 13th, 6:00 PM. Amy sat down in a hard, metal chair against the wall in the chilly police station. It was still October 13 th. “How can this be?” Amy whispered to herself while two police officers in starched black uniforms looked on at her with strange looks on their faces. No time had passed. She and Chloe had arrived at the Mansion around 5:00 pm on the 13th. According to the clock, it was 6:00 pm of the same day. There was no way that everything that she and Chloe had gone through had happened in the short extent of an hour. It had been twenty-four hours…at least. It had probably been much more.
Amy left the police station feeling more confused than ever before. It was hard enough to try to explain what had happened that night as it was. Now, Amy was at a loss to even understand why time had not passed the entire time she had been at Murky Shallows. For Amy, this was something she was never able to comprehend. She began to feel as if she was losing her mind.
After two days, Chloe’s parents reported their daughter as a missing person. When this happened, Amy was the first to be contacted. Once again, Amy tried to explain what had happened at Murky Shallows. This time, the police were slightly more willing to listen. Even so, as the deputy wrote down Amy’s story in his tiny notebook, he silently shook his head and pressed his lips together, as if he didn’t understand or believer a word she was saying.
Chloe’s face began to appear on posters at the post office and on the back page of grocery store adds with the caption, “Have you seen me?” Years passed, and Chloe’s face appeared in fewer and fewer advertisements. Slowly, she was being forgotten. Chloe’s family had given up hope that their daughter would ever be found. At first, they welcomed Amy into their home and would listen eagerly to her story, because she had been the last one to see Chloe. However, as time passed, Chloe’s family avoided Amy whenever they could. They would pass by her on the street without saying hello, neglect to pick up the phone when she called, or pretend to be not home when she visited. At first, they simply avoided her because just the sight of Amy would bring up the painful memories of their lost daughter, but as time passed, and the town began to whisper about Amy’s insanity since the disappearance of her friend, Chloe’s family took the stories to heart, almost blaming Amy for their daughter’s unknown fate. It was around this time that Amy finished her senior year of college. It should have been a happy time for her, and in some ways it was. In other ways, however, it was not. Amy was ostracized by the suspicious community, even by her classmates. During this time, Amy stopped telling the story of what happened in the mansion. It wasn’t worth it. No one would ever believe her. Amy simply gave up. Because of her silence, everyone thought that things had gone back to normal. Amy’s parents stopped paying the shrink to come in for weekly visits, and only paid him for monthly ones. Eventually, the visits were stopped altogether, much to the distress of the shrink who thought that he had found a patient for life. Amy’s “friends,” who had formerly avoided her, leaving her to spend her Saturday nights in the dorm, alone while they all went out to parties where Amy was not invited, began to pay her attention again. “Amy’s doing much better now,” they would say. “She’s come out of that weird crazy stage she went through.” “Well, I guess that’s what happens when one of your best friends disappears mysteriously, and you were the last one to see her alive,” said one boy, trying to rationalize the years of seeming insanity that he had seen in Amy.
